Immigrant worker: No more money to Mexico - CNN.com ANAHEIM, California (CNN) -- As he fixes a broken sliding glass door at an apartment in Anaheim, California, Eduardo Gutierrez worries about his parents in Mexico.
He can no longer afford to send the $200 to $300 a month he had been sending back home to support his ailing father.
"I kind of feel bad that I can't help my parents," said Gutierrez, a legal immigrant who has worked in the United States for 20 years. "I try. But I can't these days, and it's a tough situation."
Gutierrez said he earns $18.50 an hour as a glazier, installer and fixer of glass in all shapes and sizes.
But with the U.S. economy sagging, his hours have shrunk, even as his gas and grocery bills have skyrocketed along with other expenses. He's struggling just to support his wife and three children.
Bank of Mexico, Mexico's equivalent to the Federal Reserve, says stories like these are becoming more common. Deceleration in the U.S. construction industry resulted in $100 million less in "remittances" -- money from workers in the U.S. to their relatives in Mexico -- in January this year, the most recent available stats. The overall figure went from $1.7 billion in January 2007 to $1.6 billion this January, according to Bank of Mexico.
The slowdown in such money has been a consistent theme over the last year. The World Bank says remittances received by people in Mexico nearly ground to a halt in 2007, growing at a rate of 1.4 percent, compared with more than 20 percent annual growth from 2002 to 2006.
"The slowdown in Mexico is partly due to the weak job market in the United States, especially in the construction sector," the World Bank says on its Web site.
A poll, released Wednesday, of 5,000 Latin American adults living in the United States found that only 50 percent of respondents were still sending money on a regular basis to loved ones, down from 73 percent in a similar poll conducted in 2006. The poll was conducted in February by the Inter-American Development Bank's Multilateral Investment Fund.
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